WHY AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING

The Doors Of Perception: Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything

By Tim O'Shea www.thedoctorwithin.com 8-18-1

Aldous Huxley's inspired 1956 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched, infinite rawness.

Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and atbreastudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?

It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given popular opinion.

If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that

Conventional Wisdom.

In America, conventional wisdom that has mbutt acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it.

Examples:

* Pharmaceuticals restore health * Vaccination brings immunity * The cure for cancer is just around the corner * Menopause is a disease condition * When a child is sick, he needs immediate antibiotics * When a child has a fever he needs Tylenol * Hospitals are safe and clean. * America has the best health care in the world. * Americans have the best health in the world. * Milk is a good source of calcium. * You never outgrow your need for milk. * Vitamin C is ascorbic acid. * Aspirin prevents heart attacks. * Heart drugs improve the heart. * Back and neck pain are the only reasons for spinal adjustment. * No child can get into school without being vaccinated. * The FDA thoroughly tests all drugs before they go on the market. * Back and neck pain are the only reason for spinal adjustment. * Pregnancy is a serious medical condition * Chemotherapy and radiation are effective cures for cancer * When your child is diagnosed with an ear infection, antibiotics should be given immediately 'just in case' * Ear tubes are for the good of the child. * Estrogen drugs prevent osteoporosis after menopause. * Pediatricians are the most highly trained of al medical specialists. * The purpose of the health care industry is health. * HIV is the cause of AIDS. * AZT is the cure. * Without vaccines, infectious diseases will return * Fluoride in the city water protects your teeth * Flu shots prevent the flu. * Vaccines are thoroughly tested before being placed on the Mandated Schedule. * Doctors are certain that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any possible risks. * There is a power shortage in California. * There is a meningitis epidemic in California. * The NASDAQ is a natural market controlled only by supply and demand. * Chronic pain is a natural consequence of aging. * Soy is your healthiest source of protein. * Insulin shots cure diabetes. * After we take out your gall bladder you can eat anything you want * Allergy medicine will cure allergies. This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions and billions to conjure up. Did you ever wonder why you never see the President speaking publicly unless he is reading? Or why most people in this country think generally the same about most of the above issues?

HOW THIS WHOLE SET-UP GOT STARTED

In Trust Us We're Experts, Stauber and Rampton pull together some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in America. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Spin. From his own amazing chronicle Propaganda, we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud himself and applied them to the emerging science of mbutt persuasion. The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays used these same ideas to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.

THE FATHER OF SPIN

Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 40 years after that. (Tye) During all that time, Bernays took on hundreds of diverse buttignments to create a public perception about some idea or product. A few examples: As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays' first buttignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to "Make the World Safe for Democracy." (Ewen)

A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with. He organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade smoking cigarettes as a mark of women's liberation. Such publicity followed from that one event that from then on women have felt secure about destroying their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.

Bernays popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast. Not one to turn down a challenge, he set up the advertising format along with the AMA that lasted for nearly 50 years proving that cigarettes are beneficial to health. Just look at ads in issues of Life or Time from the 40s and 50s.

During the next several decades Bernays and his colleagues evolved the principles by which mbuttes of people could be generally swayed through messages repeated over and over hundreds of times. One the value of media became apparent, other countries of the world tried to follow our lead. But Bernays really was the gold standard. Josef Goebbels, who was Hitler's minister of propaganda, studied the principles of Edward Bernays when Goebbels was developing the popular rationale he would use to convince the Germans that they had to purify their race. (Stauber)

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Bernay's job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would put a particular product or concept in a desirable light. Bernays described the public as a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to "control the mbuttes without their knowing it." The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

Stauber describes Bernays' rationale like this: "the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a democratic society." Trust Us p 42

These early mbutt persuaders postured themselves as performing a moral service for humanity in general - democracy was too good for people; they needed to be told what to think, because they were incapable of rational thought by themselves. Here's a paragraph from Bernays' Propaganda: "Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society consbreastute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the mbuttes. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."